Search

Main navigation

Trials of the Flesh: Caravaggio in Milan

Sam Ben-Meir is professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy Collage in New York.

MILAN, Italy – The ambitiously conceived exhibition 'Dentro Caravaggio' (Inside Caravaggio) wants us to see this extraordinary painter with new eyes. Currently on display at the Palazzo Reale in Milan,eighteen masterpieces are accompanied bynever-before-seenreflectographs and x-radiographs. These artistic diagnoses offer viewers a glimpse into Caravaggio's creative process –to see how he worked, to observe his method. To be sure, the journey that this exhibition takes us on is revelatory and transformative.

Caravaggio is ultimately a painter of exposure, revealing the human experience as one of constitutive vulnerability. Michaelangelo Merisi was born in 1571 in the town of Caravaggio, not far from Milan, where he spent much of the first twenty years of his life, before making his way to Rome. With the arrival of the plague, Caravaggio's family was not spared: by the time he was eight, the boy had lost his uncle, grandfather, and father. There can be little doubt that early exposure to extreme terror, physical anguish and death informed his vision as a painter who specializes in scenes of humanity in extremis.

No hope no fear. This was the motto of Caravaggio and his comrades. When we look at his life: the constant run-ins with the law, his sword and dagger wielding escapades in Rome, his irascibility and propensity to self-sabotage; his readiness to quarrel, attack and even to kill, we see a man who seems to be perpetually drawn to the edge, who only knows how to live at the extreme verge of existence. And in fact, the truth of his art is just that: it expresses our ineluctable fate – our existence is always and ever on the brink of being and non-being.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599-1600), where we see the Assyrian General precisely at the moment when he is no longer alive, and not yet dead. The show opens with this breathtaking masterpiece: a work of such immense power that one is left speechless before it – as if a witness to the ravishingly beautiful Judith and her deliberate and studied decapitation of the powerful man she has just seduced. In the painting,the heroine’s lips are parted slightly, a rending that is true to the Book of Judith which tells us that the pious widow prayed Give me strength this day, O Lord God of Israel as she severed the head of her enemy. As the late art historian E. H. Gombrich rightly observed, “Caravaggio must have read the Bible again and again, and pondered its words.”

Not mentioned in the text are Judith's erect nipples, visible beneath her semi-translucent blouse. This subtly underscores the eroticism of an unusually violent act of unexpected intimacy – where the Assyrian is literally being penetrated by his own sword, undone by the very thing which represents his power, his manhood. The mighty commander is brought low by a determined young woman, whileher wizened old maid looks on ready to gather the head "in her food bag" once her mistress has succeeded in detaching it.

Caravaggio painted St. John the Baptist numerous times, and two of these are in the exhibit. The more extraordinary one is St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness (ca.1603) now owned by the Nelson-Atkin’s Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. This is a John who speaks to us loudly, even as he sits silent and brooding.

At first sight, the young man can easily be viewed as a rather moody adolescent – but the sullenness is not mere juvenile petulance. This is a deeply religious rendering of John as he meditates on his ultimate fate – which will be to suffer execution on the orders of King Herod; he knows about the abuse of power, and the corruption of conscience it breeds. With the intense chiaroscuro, the picture is lit as though a flash of lightening has, for an instant, illuminated John in a woodland setting. The severity and intensity of this saint, with his crimson drapery, animal furs, and simple reed cross reminds us that this is a preacher of repentance: a Nazarite who understood the inadequacy and folly of mankind, along with the reckless and foolish ways of those who wield power.

In the Madonna of Loreto (1605), two kneeling peasants pray before the Virgin and Child. Caravaggio characteristically emphasizes the naked legs and exposed dirty feet of the male pilgrim, as well as the torn soiled cap of the old woman. While it is undoubtedly true that pilgrims to Loreto entered the shrine with bare feet and tattered clothing to display their humility, the artist’s insistence on their poverty reveals his affinity for the severe pauperist strain of the Catholic counter-reformation. Caravaggio's Christianity is emphatically a Christianity of the poor. Andrew Graham-Dixon rightly calls the painting, “a tour de force of naked religious populism ... blatant in its appeal to the masses.”

Caravaggio's work is a prolonged meditation on the vulnerability which marks our condition regardless of how powerful or brave we might be, regardless of our skill with a blade. In fact, Caravaggio was, by all accounts, a quite proficient swordsman; so much so that in 1606 he killed a man in a prearranged duel, prompting his flight from Rome.

By 1607 Caravaggio found refuge in Naples, where he would transform painting literally overnight. Among the greatest treasures to be included in the show is the monumental "Flagellation of Christ" (1607), a painting of such harrowing brutality that it is almost unbearable. At the same time, it is the consummation of Caravaggio's art, one of his most perfectly realized works, encapsulating his vision of humanity in all its terrible beauty and fragility. Initially greeted by the Neapolitans with "stunned admiration, bordering on bewilderment," the Flagellation lays bare for all to see the true meaning of fleshly existence, and the radical vulnerability it implies.

On the one hand, we are witnessing a man being tortured, confronted with its awful and twisted form of intimacy. We see the classically conceived Christ as he is literally beginning to collapse from exhaustion, while his tormentors kick, snarl and yank his hair to get him back in place. There hardly appears to be any note of transcendence here – we seem to be alone with nothing but darkness lying beyond a scene of torment. At the same time, Christ’s body has within it a kind of luminescence: in the very flesh that is being savaged there is a divinity. Caravaggio finds the transcendence here, in this world – God is made manifest in the flesh.

Although his art soared, and commissions poured in, Caravaggio's troubles did not end: he would acquire new and dangerous enemies among the Knights of Malta, who for a time welcomed the painter and were even prepared to make him one of their own. Caravaggio's portrait of the dignified and stern Maltese Knight, Fra. Antonio Martelli (1608) is included in the exhibition – it is one of the finest of the seventeenth century, and would have a powerful influence on Rembrandt, among others.

In just over a year, the painter would fall out with the brotherhood and eventually suffer grievously for a perceived insult to one of its members. In 1610, as he left a tavern in Naples, Caravaggio was ambushed and his face badly mutilated. A struggle for his life ensued, and shortly after his recovery he was finally permitted to return to Rome. However, ill fate and exhaustion caught up with the artist and he died enroute.

With the Martyrdom of St. Ursula (1610) we have what is perhaps Caravaggio's final painting. Ursula stands, gazing down, her fingers placed on either side of the arrow that has just been fired at pointblank range into her chest by the King of the Huns. It is a terrible scene of very matter-of-fact, almost mechanical, killing. Ursula is caught, like many of Caravaggio's other subjects, between life and death. She hovers at the edge of the abyss, and the insinuation – in the positioning of her hands and her slightly protruding belly – is that she is about to give birth, highlighting the interpenetration of living and dying. The picture contains the last portrait we have of the painter, whose upturned head peers blindly into the impenetrable darkness, mouth agape as though overcome by the desperation and inscrutability of our human lot.

This exhibition brings out a Caravaggio that we cannot afford to overlook. “…to be afraid of ugliness seemed to Caravaggio a contemptible weakness,” as Gombrich observed, “what he wanted was truth.” Caravaggio insists on a Christianity of the poor, on a realism that is unabashed and uncompromising – and at a time when we seem to be drowning in the lies, and the corruption emanating from powerful elites, the painter offers us a sorely needed antidote.

More Essays

EXTRACT: ". But today, the impulse to gain attention on social media has produced a discourse of extreme defamation and scorched-earth tactics aimed at destroying one’s opponents.
We desperately need a broad-based movement to stand up against this type of political discourse. American history is replete with examples of people who worked together to solve – or at least defuse – serious problems, often against great odds and at significant personal risk. But the gradual demise of fact-based history in schools seems to have deprived many Americans of the common ground and optimism needed to work through challenges in the same way they once did."

Consider the following facts as you wend your way to the Guggenheim Museum and its uppermost gallery, where you will presently find The Death of Michael Stewart (1983), Basquiat’s gut-punching tribute to a slain artist, and the centerpiece for an exhibition that could hardly be more timely.

It’s worth remembering, then, that we are not designed to be consistently happy. Instead, we are designed to survive and reproduce. These are difficult tasks, so we are meant to struggle and strive, seek gratification and safety, fight off threats and avoid pain. The model of competing emotions offered by coexisting pleasure and pain fits our reality much better than the unachievable bliss that the happiness industry is trying to sell us. In fact, pretending that any degree of pain is abnormal or pathological will only foster feelings of inadequacy and frustration.
Postulating that there is no such thing as happiness may appear to be a purely negative message, but the silver lining, the consolation, is the knowledge that dissatisfaction is not a personal failure. If you are unhappy at times, this is not a shortcoming that demands urgent repair, as the happiness gurus would have it. Far from it. This fluctuation is, in fact, what makes you human.

"........since World War II, 97% of unimproved grassland habitats have vanished from the UK. This has contributed to the loss of pollinating insects – and the distribution of one third of species has shrunk since 1980."

"For many of us, eating a meal containing meat is a normal part of daily life. But if we dig deeper, some sobering issues emerge.
Every year, 66 billion terrestrial animals are slaughtered for food. Predictions are that meat consumption will rise, with increasing demand for meat from China and other Asian countries as their standards of living increase.
The impact of grazing animals on the environment is devastating. They produce 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and livestock farming is a major contributor to species extinctions."

"Throughout history, people who have gained positions of power tend to be precisely the kind of people who should not be entrusted with it. A desire for power often correlates with negative personality traits: selfishness, greed and a lack of empathy. And the people who have the strongest desire for power tend to be the most ruthless and lacking in compassion."

"In this era of Trump, it should perhaps come as no surprise to find supposed experts lacking in historical perspective. Yet it is still disappointing to find this deficit in the New York Times, which prides itself on clinging to a pursuit of the truth. So it is a bit sad to read the plaintive cry of Allison Schrager’s op-ed of May 17, lamenting that the domination of art markets by the super-rich will somehow force smaller galleries to go out of business, and imperil the careers of young artists."

Extract: "ust as an earlier generation resisted the limiting post-War era "white middle class" definition of being American by giving birth to an awakening of cultural pluralism and ethnic pride, it falls to our generation to fight for an expanded view of the idea of being American that rejects the narrow view projected by Trump and white nationalists.
The idea of America isn't theirs. It's bigger than they are and unless our national cohesion is to unravel, this challenge must be met by projecting an inclusive vision of America that celebrates our inclusive national identity in an increasingly globalized world."

Whatever other attributes Homo sapiens may have – and much is made of our opposable thumbs, upright walking and big brains – our capacity to impact the environment far and wide is perhaps unprecedented in all of life’s history. If nothing else, we humans can make an almighty mess.

A century ago, unspeakable horrors took place on every continent that were known only to the victims and the perpetrators. Not so today. As a result of advances in communications – from the telegraph and radio to satellite television and the internet – the pain and loss of global tragedies are brought home to us in real time.
Because of this expanding consciousness, the post-World War II era has witnessed the rise of visionary leaders and the birth of countless organizations dedicated to alleviating suffering and elevating the causes of peace, human rights, and tolerance among peoples. Individually and collectively, they have championed the rights of peoples in far-flung corners of the world, some of which had been previously unknown to those who became their advocates. These same leaders and groups have also fought for civil rights and for economic, social, political, and environmental justice in their own countries.

“Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. I am so rich… and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with” (Moby Dick, chapter cviii).

Economists speak in numbers only, clinging to statistical data and quantitative models. We do so in the hope of looking objective. But this is counter-productive – “data” cannot tell us everything. Other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology use a broader range of methods, and consequently have a broader perspective on society. If we take our societal role of adviser on economic matters seriously, we will need to open up and adopt the insights that these other disciplines bring us about how the economy works.Politics and economics are inextricably intertwined, as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx knew all too well. Somehow this has been forgotten. This does not mean economists need to get political or choose sides. But it does mean that we ignore politics at our own peril – by blindsiding ourselves or dismissing it as “external stuff”, we hamper our understanding of the very system we study.

Although it is not likely that many visitors who pass by the Giacometti sculptures on their way to Las Meninas will ponder it, the contrast between these works underscores the single greatest transformation in the history of western art, from a regime in which artists tailored their works to the aims of individual patrons, to one in which artists choose their techniques and motifs according to their own concerns, and only then present the products to an anonymous competitive market

On March eleventh, the world lost someone who was very special, who made a mark and touched people with his voice, as a singer, a humorist and writer..........I had the great good fortune to know him and spend time with him, playing music, talking with him – he was a man of immense culture, fluent in Hebrew, German, English, and Romanian. He loved New York City and Vienna and we would often swap apartments so that he could stay in New York while I lived at his place in Vienna.

The ongoing controversy over admissions to American universities has overlooked the one of the most telling aspects of the scandal—that it took place with the connivance and active participation of administrative bureaucracies able to act with impunity in the pursuit of their interests. Neither the professoriate, often the target of opprobrium from the left and the right, nor the student body, also the target of criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, bore any of the responsibility.
Current debates over “what ails” U.S. colleges and universities consistently ignore the single most important dynamic of all institutions—their structure of power. I suggest that the way in which power is allocated within American universities is strikingly similar to that of Soviet-type regimes. Presidents, chancellors, provosts, deans, and their bureaucratic apparatuses preside over vast real-estate and financial holdings, engage in the economic equivalent of central planning, have inordinate influence over personnel, and are structured hierarchically, thereby forming an enormously powerful “new class” like that described by the renowned Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas, in the mid-1950s.

When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies – the kind missionaries used to dismiss as “pagan” – envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behaviour. Their concern was less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed suitable deference to them.
Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism – such as karma – for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralising religions came into being.

European food and ingredients have become staple food choices for the British. The use of ingredients such as garlic, peppers, avocados, Parmesan cheese and all those other European ingredients that are now taken for granted are relatively new and were still rare in the 1990s. When I was growing up in rural Devon in the 1970s, olive oil was only really readily available in chemists as a cure for earache – now it is found in most food cupboards. And wine drinking has permeated through all social classes.

The Guggenheim’s strange and wonderful exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking, yet largely unknown body of abstract art is an important event – one that challenges us to not only rethink the early history of twentieth century abstract art, but to recognize her vision of art and reality as unique, authentic, and deliciously puzzling.

Looking at the world today, it's clear that the consequences of this imperial legacy are still with us. If anything has changed it is that we are now beyond just viewing the former "natives" as far-away oddities. They are now living within our borders, having come to find the opportunities they were denied at home. So when I hear the reactions in the West to the influx of South Asians going to the UK, or North Africans going to France, or Central Americans migrating to the US, I can only say "Guys, these are the fruits of your conquest – your chickens coming home to roost."